This disclosure relates to scheduling a process to operate on different hosts. In particular, it relates to scheduling a process running on a first host to run on a second hosts and to move process data stored in memory of the first host to the second host.
Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) architectures allow two or more processors, or processor cores, to share a single shared memory. SMP can also allow processors to share access to input/output (I/O) devices and to be controlled by a single OS instance. In certain embodiments, each processor can be treated equally. SMP systems can therefore be useful for providing processes with access to a pool of shared hardware, including processors, memory and I/O devices. The different hardware components can be connected through a system bus, network, crossbar switch or similar interconnection mechanism.
Non-uniform memory access (NUMA) memory can be used with multiprocessing, where the memory access time depends on the memory location relative to a processor. Under NUMA access times to different portions of main memory can be different depending upon the physical hardware that stores the desired data. For instance, a processor located on a first host may be able to access local memory faster than memory stored on another host.